by Glen Ford 

President Obama, that imperialist son-of-a…um, Kenyan, last week unveiled what he described as a “new” U.S. Strategy Toward Sub-Saharan Africa. The White House report does not once mention AFRICOM, the U.S. military command that has pushed aside the State Department as the primary institution of U.S. policy and power in sub-Saharan Africa.

The report comes three years after Obama’s trip to Ghana, when he declared that Africa’s biggest problems were “corruption and poor governance,” rather than five centuries (and still counting) of Euro-American predation. African complaints about “neo-colonialism, or [that] the West has been oppressive, or racism” are mere “excuses,” said Obama, in a performance that scholar Ama Biney described as “imperialist lecturing” and “Obama-speak.”

By Laura Carlsen

Hilda Lezama was taking passengers back upriver to the township of Ahuas after a fishing expedition in a remote area of the Mosquito Coast in Honduras. In the pre-dawn darkness, she could hear the helicopters buzzing overhead, but she thought nothing of it at first.

Suddenly, bullets shot from U.S. State Department helicopters with DEA agents and Honduran police aboard penetrated both her legs.

“I threw myself in the water so they wouldn’t shoot me again,” she said. She stayed there, grabbing onto a branch and keeping only her nose above the water, to avoid the hail of bullets.

Later, in a press conference, Lezama spoke on her daughter’s cell phone from a hospital bed in La Ceiba. In a surprisingly calm voice for someone just shot and at risk of never walking again, Lezama said she never imagined the helicopters would fire on her little boat-- with its cargo of fishermen, women and children.

by Debra Sweet

One of the joys of traveling to speak is meeting the people at the other end of e-mail, as I did in Madison this past weekend at the Veterans for Peace Memorial Day commemoration.  In addition to putting up a “Memorial Mile” of thousands of tombstones marking U.S. deaths in Iraq & Afghanistan, they had an anti-war contingent in the official city parade where they reported strong crowd support.  At the afternoon commemoration, they made a point of reading names of Afghans killed in the U.S. War on Afghanistan.

from Revolution 

The presidential elections are gearing up for real... and there is the rising chorus yet again of those who say that whatever problems there are with Obama and the Democrats, the “alternative”—the Republicans—is unthinkable and much, much worse. But the reality is that Obama as president has been even worse than Bush in some key ways for the masses of people in the U.S. and around the world. Here are three of the ways that Obama has outdone Bush in fascistic, brutal, reactionary moves in service of the U.S. capitalist-imperialist system.

by Glen Ford 

If anyone has doubts about what it means here at home when the U.S. seeks to militarily dominate the world, take a trip to Chicago, this week. There, you’ll see the Chicago police, the second largest force in the country, reinforced by cops from Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Charlotte, North Carolina, and backed up by two high decibel noise machines that were first used against American civilians in Pittsburgh to blow out the eardrums of protesters, back in 2009. Overall security for the NATO summit meeting is overseen by the FBI and the Secret Service, who in recent months have been given unprecedented police state powers, thanks to President Obama and a bipartisan Congress.

We are inviting people everywhere to contribute the names of victims of NATO violence, using the hashtag #NATOvictims. We will recite the names as part of a Memorial for the Victims of US/NATO Wars on May 21, the second day of the NATO Summit. Stay tuned for more details of the event -- to be released shortly.

Here are some examples of the kinds of stories we want to focus on and draw attention to - as the war criminals with NATO meet behind locked doors, we will commemorate their victims and pledge that their humanity will never be forgotten.

MASSACRE OF EL-HAMEDI FAMILY
Contact the Khaleda Org. Nato killed his 3 sons and Pregnat wife, he is fighting 4 all children killed by Nato
via @GetOutNATO

Extremely graphic footage: Libyan children killed by NATO bombs
via @GetOutNATO

Afghan Refugee Children Perish in Harsh Winter #AfghanistanTuesday
via Come Home America 

While the data from the survey is still being compiled, she said, Ms. Bara expects the number of children under 5 who died to total 120. “I would say 100 of them for sure were due to cold weather — despite our help,” she said. “Nobody saw it coming.” That worked out to a mortality rate of 2.5 per 10,000 children per day, establishing it as a full-fledged humanitarian disaster, she said.
via Al Jazeera

Why we must name all drone attack victims
via Chris Woods @tbij

NATO Admits Killing Afghan Mother, 5 Children in Air Strike
via Common Dreams

Turkey's Attack on Civilians Tied to U.S. Military Drone
via Wall Street Journal

by Glenn Greenwald

Peter Bergen, the Director of National Security Studies at the Democratic-Party-supportive New America Foundation, has a long Op-Ed in The New York Times today glorifying President Obama as a valiant and steadfast “warrior President”; it begins this way:

THE president who won the Nobel Peace Prize less than nine months after his inauguration has turned out to be one of the most militarily aggressive American leaders in decades.

Just ponder that: not only the Democratic Party, but also its progressive faction, is wildly enamored of “one of the most militarily aggressive American leaders in decades.” That’s quite revealing on multiple levels. Bergen does note that irony: he recalls that Obama used his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech to defend the justifications for war and points out: “if those on the left were listening, they didn’t seem to care.” He adds that “the left, which had loudly condemned George W. Bush for waterboarding and due process violations at Guantánamo, was relatively quiet when the Obama administration, acting as judge and executioner, ordered more than 250 drone strikes in Pakistan since 2009, during which at least 1,400 lives were lost.”

by Larry Everest

The Syrian uprising against the regime of Bashar al-Assad is entering its second year, with signs that the U.S. and its allies are moving toward more direct and aggressive intervention.

The Syrian people’s revolt against Assad’s brutal, oppressive, pro-imperialist rule began a year ago last March, inspired by the popular uprisings sweeping the region. Since then it has gone through various twists and turns and involved a wide range of political forces, including both the Syrian masses as well as reactionary Islamists, pro-U.S. exiles, and former members of the regime. Assad has responded with extreme violence—firing directly on protesters, arresting and torturing suspected opponents, and indiscriminately shelling neighborhoods. An estimated 8,000 have been killed and many thousands more wounded or driven from their homes.

By Dennis Loo 

Since Dick Cheney recently had a heart transplant, I think it’s appropriate that I also have a change of heart. Those things that I said about you Dick, those criticisms I aimed at you and W., for misleading the nation into wars, for engaging in torture, I mean, “alternative interrogation techniques,” for spying on every American and anyone communicating with Americans, for negating Congressional intent by hundreds of signing statements, for not coming to New Orleans sooner in the face of Katrina, for not addressing global warming and peak oil, I take it all back.

You were right and I was wrong: global warming’s a myth, New Orleans needed urban renewal by storm, those levees didn’t need maintenance and we so much more needed those marshes to be converted into golf courses for those of us who understand the really important things in life: golf, business power lunches, fine food and women, making deals and living high on the hog. The liberation of Iraq, of Afghanistan, of Pakistan, the huge tax cuts to the wealthy, these are the things that you were spearheading and I didn’t see that what you were doing was really the right thing after all. Those people abroad really do love us and those people in those Occupy protests; they’re just a bunch of malcontents!

by Glenn Greenwald 

(1) A reader reminded me of this yesterday and it’s really quite something: in July, 2009, NBC‘s Chuck Todd went on Morning Joe to defend President Obama’s decision to shield all Bush officials from prosecution for torture, arguing that because Bush got his lawyers to say he could torture, it was legal. I interviewed/debated Todd a couple of days later about those views, but before I did, I wrote a reply to the argument he made on television.

When doing so, I tried to think of the most extreme tyrannical and lawless power possible which a President could hypothetically assert, in order to reveal the invalidity of Todd’s reasoning, and this is what I wrote:

by Joe Scarry

We were stuck outside while Eric Holder addressed a group of Northwestern Law students and others this afternoon. We could catch glimpses, through the dark glass of the building lobby, of the crowd filing in to the Thorne Auditorium to hear the speech.

Afterward one audience member summed up the speech as he left:

"He pretty much said he can kill anyone he wants."

Any questions?